Until now, abortion in Korea was illegal under the Criminal Act. Article 259 of the Criminal Act enacted in 1953 provided that a woman who procures her own miscarriage by drugs or other means shall be punished by up to one year in prison or a fine of up to two million won, and Article 270 provided that a doctor, herbal doctor, midwife, pharmacist or druggist who procures a miscarriage at a woman's request or with her consent shall be punished by up to two years in prison. In principle, therefore, any abortion was punishable. In practice, however, abortion in Korea was not strictly restricted equally at all times. When family planning became national policy in the 1960s, it was impossible to stop abortion entirely and a legal basis was needed, so the Mother and Child Health Act was enacted in 1973. Article 14 of that Act, on the permitted limits of induced abortion, allows it for rape, incest, serious threats to health and eugenic reasons, and Article 28 exempted such cases from the Criminal Act. For about fifty years, then, abortion law in Korea was split between the Mother and Child Health Act and the Criminal Act. Formally this could be seen as partial legalization, but more than 80 percent of abortions actually performed in Korea were reported to be illegal.

Yet very few cases were ever prosecuted for abortion, and some said the crime had become a dead letter. In 2005 Korea's total fertility rate was 1.08, among the lowest in the world. A discourse of low-fertility crisis emerged, and various policies to raise the number of births were created along with the Framework Act on Low Birth Rate in an Aging Society. Against this demographic background, the government in 2005 adopted a comprehensive plan to prevent illegal abortion in order to raise the birth rate. In 2009 a pro-life doctors' group filed complaints against clinics performing illegal abortions, which severely limited access and led more women to pay high prices for unsafe abortions. In 2016 an amendment to the rules on administrative sanctions in medicine was announced that would classify abortion as unethical medical conduct and strengthen penalties for doctors, including twelve-month suspensions. This in the end discouraged providers of abortion services.

Two constitutional complaints were filed against the abortion crime. The Court upheld it in 2012 and found it nonconforming to the Constitution in 2019. Many factors were involved in the change, but the most important was that the debate moved away from framing abortion as a clash between self-determination and the right to life. In 2012 the Court saw abortion as a conflict between the woman's right to self-determination and the fetus's right to life, so it handled the issue by banning abortion to protect the fetus's life while protecting the woman's self-determination through exceptions. In 2019, however, the Court recognized that framing the issue as a clash of abstract legal interests could not deal with the complex realities of abortion and could protect neither the pregnant woman's self-determination nor the fetus's life.

This shift is linked to the rise of abortion discourse in the reproductive rights movement of civil society after 2016. A central claim of that movement was that abortion, like other areas of medicine, should be discussed not as legal or illegal but as safe or unsafe, and that regulation and restriction only increase unsafe abortion by preventing abortion early in pregnancy.

As a result, following the 2019 ruling of constitutional nonconformity, the abortion provisions of the Criminal Act lost their effect.

Note: On April 11, 2019, the Constitutional Court held the provisions punishing self-induced abortion and abortion by doctors nonconforming to the Constitution, with four justices for nonconformity, three for simple unconstitutionality and two finding them constitutional, and ordered revision by December 31, 2020 (2017Hun-Ba127); no revision was made, so they lost effect on January 1, 2021. In 2012 the Court had upheld the ban on a 4-4 vote. The Criminal Act was enacted on September 18, 1953, while the government was founded in 1948, and the paper's 'Article 259' is a mistake for Article 269. In a 2024 case involving an abortion at 36 weeks, the doctors were convicted of murder, upheld on appeal in July 2026, while the woman was acquitted on appeal.